The weather has taken a turn towards cold and my work day has become quite chilling. Yesterday's high temperature was 10 degrees; the low was 3. Yesterday I learned my school has no central heating. In fact, only the classes and offices are heated--everything else, e.g. hallways and lavatories, is warmed only by the sun's feeble autumnal rays and body heat. I also learned that someone in charge likes things brisk. Both yesterday and today, when morning temperatures approached freezing, exterior doors and some windows were left wide open all day long. In the halls, the school's a meat locker.
I have experienced a new discomfort: my office and classroom are on one side of the school. The lavatories are on the other (and down several flights of stairs), perhaps 100 meters away. This is a miserable trip to make through a meat locker. As I mentioned above, the lavatories are not heated. They're also adjacent to three (open) exterior doors. And the gents' sports an exhaust fan, i.e. a sizable hole in the wall that allows cold outside air free ingress. And there's no hot water. And the only hand-drying tool supplied is of the electric air-blasting kind... and it only blasts cold air. All this adds up to a dreadfully cold excretory expedition. A conundrum: do I leave the toilet with wet hands and suffer all the way back, get my suffering straight away from the hand dryer or not wash my hands at all? My coworkers seem to prefer the latter. We'll see how this plays out.
Oh, and the heater in my classroom is broken.
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